Fall From Favor, Conspiracies
Friend and confidante of the queen, she was banished from court after an incident in which she had encouraged the pregnant queen in boisterous games in the corridors of the Louvre, resulting in a miscarriage. The duc de Chevreuse used all his influence to have her restored to court.
In her attempts to regain her lost position, she provoked or encouraged the conspiracies of the court, such as the Buckingham affair (1623–24) that compromised the Queen, which she instigated with the connivance of her English lover, Henry Rich, later created Earl of Holland, and of the highest-ranking aristocrats against Richelieu, such as her complicity in the conspiracy of her lover, the comte de Chalais, that she set up in 1626, with the unlikely intention of replacing Louis XIII with his brother, Gaston d'Orléans. Chalais, deeply embroiled, lost his head on 19 August 1626, while the duchesse de Chevreuse fled to Lorraine, where she soon carried on an affair with Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine, who intervened on her behalf to have her allowed to return to France; once she was reestablished at Dampierre, her subversion of royal power continued.
She was at the center of all the intrigues that involved foreign powers against France: negotiations with the duchy of Lorraine and with Spain conducted by Charles de l'Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf, keeper of the seals, who ruined himself on her behalf, revealing to her the councils of the king (1633). Secret exchanges of correspondence with Spain carried out by Anne of Austria were unmasked in 1637, requiring de Chevreuse to flee to Spain, then to England and finally to Flanders. She was involved in the conspiracy of the comte de Soissons (1641) and at the death of the king, a clause in the testament of succession forbade the return to France of the duchesse; a decision of the Parlement of Paris was required to break the will.
After the death of Richelieu, once again in France, she conspired at the center of the cabale des Importants led by Chateauneuf against Mazarin, in 1643; with the arrest and exile of César de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, she fled once again. During the Fronde, she came closer to Mazarin for a time (1649–1650), but then she switched back to the aristocratic party when the parliamentary Fronde and the aristocratic Fronde joined forces in 1651.
She died in retirement in the convent of Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis département) in 1679.
Read more about this topic: Marie De Rohan
Famous quotes containing the words fall and/or conspiracies:
“To slip upon a pavement is better than to slip with the tongue: so the fall of the wicked shall come speedily.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 20:18.
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)